At least 10 unaccompanied minors disembark from an ICE chartered GlobalX deportation flight on Sunday, Aug. 31, 2025 after a judge ruled they be removed. The flight was set to deport the children to Guatemala.

President Donald Trump has suffered three major legal setbacks in recent days that experts say could put his plans for mass deportation at risk – at least until a higher court steps in.

Over the week bridging August and September, federal judges in separate cases have ruled against the president's immigration enforcement tactics and sided with immigrant advocates who have challenged their legality.

Judges blocked the deportation of some migrant children who crossed the border alone; forbade the rapid removal of immigrants who have been in the country for more than two years; and stopped the administration's use of an arcane law to deport alleged gang members without due process.

Trump administration officials and supporters have slammed the decisions of so-called "activist judges" who they say are overstepping their authority to prevent the president's enforcement of the nation's immigration laws.

The one-two-three judicial punches could risk the president's plans to deport as many as 1 million people per year.

The final decision in each of the cases likely lies with the Supreme Court, though, and "the Trump administration has tended to fare much better at the Supreme Court than in the lower courts," said Michael Kagan, director of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas Immigration Clinic.

Rulings slow down Trump deportation tactics

On Friday, Aug. 29, Judge Jia M. Cobb of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia put the administration's fast-track deportations on hold, saying the use of "expedited removal" in the interior violated immigrants' due process rights.

The White House has sought to speed up the deportation process to reduce the time from arrest to deportation. The idea being: the faster the process, the higher the rate of removals.

Cobb called it a "skimpy process" that could put not only noncitizens but everyone at risk.

"When it comes to people living in the interior of the country, prioritizing speed over all else will inevitably lead the Government to erroneously remove people via this truncated process," she wrote in her opinion.

On Sunday, Aug. 31, also in the DC district court, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting ICE from deporting Guatemalan children who came to the country without a parent or guardian.

The children were already aboard deportation planes in El Paso and Harlingen, Texas, when the National Immigration Law Center filed a request for an emergency injunction.

Then, on Sept. 2, a majority of federal appellate judges in the famously conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to rapidly deport people accused of being members of a violent Venezuelan prison gang.

Back in March, Trump had invoked the law, saying that the gang known as Tren de Aragua was "undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare" against the United States.

In a 2-to-1 decision, Judge Leslie H. Southwick said there is no evidence that mass immigration in recent years constituted "an armed, organized force or forces." The judges concluded that the Alien Enemies Act "was improperly invoked."

Unconstitutional tactics or 'judicial coup'

Trump officials and supporters of the administration's immigration crackdown disagreed with the judges' findings.

After the "alien enemies" ruling, Trump aide Stephen Miller said "the judicial coup continues," in a post on the social media site X.

Broadly, the rulings take "real leaps of logic that seem aimed at preventing a president from enforcing immigration law written by Congress," said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies.

Even without the judicial obstacles, the Trump administration has an uphill road to its deportation goals. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported roughly 200,000 people since Trump took office, according to agency data.

Neither Democrat nor Republican administrations have ever successfully deported 1 million people per year, not including quick returns at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics.

It's been harder for the Trump administration to quickly drive up deportation and removal numbers, in part because illegal border crossings have dropped to record lows.

"People don't appreciate that deportation is quite a lot of work for the government, and the government has often had a hard time working it out," Kagan said.

Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Judges keep blocking the president's agenda. Are Trump's mass deportation plans at risk?

Reporting by Lauren Villagran, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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